


i've got thick skin and an elastic heart

by dykeula



Category: Vengeful - V. E. Schwab, Vicious - V. E. Schwab, Villains Series - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Blood and Torture, Body Horror, Canon Compliant ish, Dark, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Does it count if it's a hallucination?, Gen, Gore, Horror, Hurt No Comfort, It's slash if you squint, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Psychological Horror, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 22:02:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20415016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dykeula/pseuds/dykeula
Summary: "You know, I never thought I‘d be the lucky gal you‘d give your heart to. Never pegged you for a romantic, Cardale."Panic rose up in his chest at the thought of Victor touching him - that thing there. "Not yours," he growled. [...] "Never yours.""Really?" Victor opened the lid of the bottle to take it out. It was... small in his palms. Frail. Fragile. Victor‘s one finger began stroking the veins on the upper side of the fleshy muscle like he would a baby bird with its wings broken.Eli could swear he felt it, felt that touch, right down to his new heart. It felt bad, but also a hell of a lot better than the doctor‘s touch had felt like. It felt better than it ought to. Sinful touches.[...] "You sure about that, Eli?"





	i've got thick skin and an elastic heart

**Author's Note:**

> I finished Vengeful yesterday (didn't like all of it, to be fair) and the entirety of Eli's POV was so. Good. Like, I hate the dude (eventho we share the same name), but the part where the doctor experiments on him and he manages to regrow an entire heart got me thinking - what about that other one? did they just throw it in the trash? Where exactly are Eli's healing powers located? In his blood? His heart? His brain?? Because if it's either his heart or blood, does that mean that if you cut out his heart and just leave it there, does THAT grow? like a tumor? Like a weird sort of R rated version of Junji Itou's Tomie? Misses Schwab, I have *questions*.  
I'm not a medical professional, obviously. I'm just a woman with a very imaginative mind and a functioning keyboard. And google.  
Another thing I'm interested in - just how truly damaged is Eli's mental health after that ordeal? The hallucination in the book is relatively mild, what if we put up the volume by a 100%?

The first time the Doctor had carved into his flesh, Eli‘d barely felt it. A blip on the horizon that was his pain threshold. And damn was it _high_. If he didn‘t have anything left, at least he still had that.

"Interesting," the doctor kept muttering, taking a precarious finger and jamming it in between two folds of muscle in his biceps. The ropes around his wrists and ankles grew tighter. "Really quite extraordinary, if I may say so", on and on and on about _potential _and _research_ and what not.

The only other person who loved the sound of his own voice as much had been Vi-. A long time ago.

Eli let him talk, most of the time. True torture never involved talking so much as it involved silence. Harrowing silence.

\--

The funny thing about regeneration - the whole butt of the joke, is this: It doesn‘t know when to stop. Just as much as some humans don‘t.

"Stop."

"And I thought you‘d never-"

"Stop."

Eli Car- Ever couldn‘t breathe. He couldn‘t breathe. Because there was currently a windpipe, some sort of rod, metallic and shining, stuck in his exposed chest cavity. Wrenched between his rib cage. He could feel it, right to the _scrape _it made against his bones every time an exhale made him shift.

He couldn‘t breathe.

"Do you suppose your body would heal around _that?"_

The oxygen in his lungs felt like it‘d caught fire. His mouth kept trying to form words, any words, but every time he tried his lungs would flare out and _rub _against that foreign object.

"I mean, suppose it‘s small enough, eh? If we really..." Haverty took the blunt end of the pipe, began driving it further- further _in? Oh god, no.. "_Really get it _in_ there, that really ought to stick, right? Growing over it. Like weeds in a garden. Like Kudzu."

"Stop." A wheeze. Close enough.

"What do you think, Mr Cardale? Is your body up to the task?" His body, as well as his mind, was currently panicking. Not sure how to proceed. Further healing would result in pain, excruciating pain, but not healing wasn‘t an option either. _Should I stay or should I go. _Eli had no idea on how to console his body because he didn‘t have the slightest clue, either.

There was currently something _in _him, something penetrating his insides. It felt like the biggest violation a human/non-human could experience. And he was powerless.

It took all he had not to cry. He hadn‘t cried in years. Centuries. Millennia.

The doctor‘s face was so close to his, those bushy eyebrows almost close enough to caress his cheek. There were sweat streaks on that face, almost as if _he _was the one currently being impaled.

The thought of freeing himself and jamming that bloodied pipe down Haverty‘s throat, down down down, all the way to his asshole, made him calm somewhat. He would get out of here. He would. Any day now.

\--

The funny thing about regeneration.

It healed. Of course it did. It couldn‘t not.

Which meant that there was currently a skin covered bump in his chest, something he could almost mistake for a fucked up pimple, but not quite. It still hurt to breathe. Every time.

There were a few times Eli had entertained the thought of just stopping. Stop breathing. But at this point he‘d been afraid, afraid of his own body and what It would do to stay alive. So he didn‘t.

He kept breathing and tried not to think of the _thing_ currently living inside his body. Like he was a rental. The obvious bulge whenever he craned his neck to look down at himself. He couldn‘t see his toes from this angle any more.

How long did it take for metal to rust?

\--

He pleaded with his body to let it kill him. To just Stop.

His body never listened. His genes were a monstrosity growing underneath his skin, like thick black sulphur invading his veins, with a will entirely detached from his own.

And if that monstrosity wanted to live, well...

\--

"Have you lost it yet?" Eli didn‘t remember when Victor came into the picture. He supposed he was always there, on the edge of his subconscious. Waiting to reveal himself. Waiting for the right moment, like he always did.

The pipe had been inside his ribcage for a week now. 5 days and 2 hours, to be exact. The healing in itself had taken a day, maybe a little more. The skin on the tip of the pipe was still fresh though, light pink and thin, stretched raw. Any minute now, it felt like he‘d snap. His body would snap. But it never did.

Looking down at himself never grew easier, actually time made it worse. The sinking feeling of looking at his chest, at that intruder in there, and thinking _this is not my body_. _This is someone else‘s_.

"Didn‘t you always use to say that your body was God‘s to command?" Victor said from his position in the shadows. Always in the shadows. Never touching. Eli supposed he was here to distract him - avert his eyes. Give him somewhere else to look at besides down. Practical.

"It is." Because it was. It _was_. He wasn‘t a serial killer, fuck, he was just a man sent on a mission.

Victor clicked his tongue and regarded him for a second, in that wolf like way of his. As if Eli was a snack he couldn‘t wait to devour.

He pointed a slender finger towards the elephant in the room. The elephant being Eli. "Is this God‘s work then? Are you serving Him right now?"

Eli chanced a look down, just a peak. That sense of wrongness again. Of being paralysed. _This is not my body. _He thought maybe he was dissociating - that would be good. For the torture. God, Eli really hoped the torture would start again soon instead of - this. Pain, he could handle, handle exceptionally well. This wasn't just flaying away his inside, it was punching dents into his already fragile mental health.

"No," Eli said after a beat of silence. His voice sounded like someone else‘s. Raw, weak. No, this wasn‘t God. This was the Devil.

Victor smiled, as if he‘d heard that.

\--

The doctor came back the next day to take it out, apparently satisfied with the results. Healing was faster after that, and the doctor had seemed - intrigued. No rust, at least not on the pipe. Eli‘s psyche, however that was a different beast entirely.

It felt like his mental health was slowly rusting and crusting off, rubbed raw. Every time his brain cells worked he imagined a metallic screeching sound, like an old machine coming to life.

"You‘ve truly lost it now." The Victor Vale in his imagination looked good. 23. Black suit. Stark contrast to his blood soaked self.

"Takes one to know one," he wheezed out, coughing up blood. The gaping hole hadn‘t been healed over yet - if it ever would. Victor just rose up his eyebrows and smiled. All white, pristine teeth.

"'Course, _Ever_," Victor said, shrugging. "I‘m you. Figment of your imagination. And besides, if you do it then I‘ve gotta do it, right?" He grinned. "Race you to the top?"

Eli smiled. He couldn‘t help himself.

\--

The sessions grew after that, but nothing as bad as that week. Blood work, DNA extraction, removal of spinal fluid. Easy peasy. Eli tried to will his mind to believe that the worst was over.

And yet, every time he looked down, his mind still startled at seeing his now flat, skinny stomach again. Seeing his feet. _Not my feet._

A part of him almost wanted the rod back.

\--

"We need to determine where the healing ability comes from, if we really want to help anyone here. Now that we‘ve tested your limits. I don‘t suppose you‘d help me with that, would you?"

Eli took the spit and blood gathering inside his throat and spit it, with as much power as he could muster, on the doctor‘s face. It wasn‘t much, but the action was satisfying enough. Haverty didn‘t even react, just left the blood on his cheeks and left brow as if it was a moisturising cream.

"So. That wasn‘t helpful," he chastised him.

"Fuck _you!_ How‘s that for helpful?"

"Attaboy," Victor whispered into his right ear, so close now. At least someone seemed pleased with him.

"Hmmm," Dr. Haverty regarded him for a second. He looked like a rat. Crawling out of the sewers, with his bloodied hands and dirty coat. Eli felt like a feral cat. He was ready to tear him wide open himself. Take turns.

\--

When the good doctor put clamps inside his chest, laced with ... something, something to slow down the healing, exposing his chest and cramping open his ribcage to expose that squishy heart of his to the cold, he left the room for a second."Duty calls," he‘d said. "Be right back."

There was a vision behind his eyelids, just out of reach. Something told him it wasn‘t Victor, no, it was - something else. He crammed his neck up to see what. His body was screaming for him to stop.

All he could see was clear black. Like the void.

"Who - What _are _you?" No answer. Eli‘s body grew clammy, feverish with the urge to heal itself. His vision was starting to grow blurry, watery.

It almost felt like he‘d needed to vomit, but then Eli imagined puking all over his exposed chest cavity, the acid eating into his insides and his heart, and that woke him up real quick. He forced himself to swallow it back down.

The thing was still there, still just watching. Eli felt exposed, naked in the worst possible way. Maybe...

"Are you Death?"

The doctor came back with even more scalpels, all arranged on a neat table he‘d brought with him. He just chuckled. "Oh, you flatter me, young man. But no..." He‘d said something else after that, but Eli didn‘t listen.

There was a humming sensation growing behind his eyelids, filling up his ears, like bees. Or like Victor‘s powers. So he listened to that instead.

\--

The minutes after Doctor Haverty had cut out his heart and before his body knew what to do were the longest stretches of time Eli Ever had ever experienced.

He was _empty_. He‘d tried panicking, but there was no muscle there to provide him with fluttering heartbeats, or to pump blood faster through his body. Just a big black nothing. Couldn‘t even talk. It felt like he was dying. Well and truly dying.

_Finally_, he thought. _What took you so damn long?_

His body felt like a broken car engine with the motor removed. A device with its batteries removed. Technically dead, but with still just enough of leftover electricity to keep going.

For some reason, the Thing inside his body kept presuming that maybe It‘d imagined the missing heart. Or that someone would put it back. Because It kept trying to rewind, to restart, but the hole in his chest wouldn‘t allow it. Like a cassette trying to rewind itself and failing, over and over and over again.

It took a couple agonizing minutes for the regrowth to start. Because the funny thing about regeneration is this: At the end of the day, all the heart‘s a muscle. And muscles could be regrown. Even from scratch.

The doctor whistled in excitement, leaned in real close to watch the process as if he was at a movie theatre. "Marvelous," he breathed, his stinky breath hitting Eli‘s sensitive intestines. "You really are quite the specimen, aren‘t you?"

Eli snarled. He felt like a cat being dissected by a rat. Hunter being consumed by prey.

\--

They‘d stitched him back up, but left the heart. The one currently not in his chest. The old version. In a fucking glass jar.

The glass jar was staring at him. He wanted it to stop staring.

As some sort of sick reward, they‘d brought in a radio. The station it was sent on only played old songs and nothing else, so he didn‘t even have the relief of listening to someone else talk. Someone else besides his torturer.

It was currently playing an old sounding song he didn‘t know.

_ I saw something sitting on your bed_

_ I saw something touching your head_

His old heart felt like it was ... moving. Pumping blood inside the glass jar, even now.

_"Puh-retty_ sure even you couldn‘t do that, buddy," Victor said, from his position next to the glass. He hadn‘t stopped looking at the fucking thing, but nothing like the old doctor looked at it. No, his gaze almost had something... romantic to it.

Eli didn‘t know his body any more, didn‘t know the Thing inhabiting it, but he hoped that Thing was satisfied and didn‘t force his old heart to regrow _him_.

"Can you stop doing that," he got out in between his clenched teeth.

The hallucination ignored his remark. "You know, I never thought _I‘_d be the lucky gal you‘d give your heart to." Victor winked at him, gingerly tracing the outline of a heart on the glass. "Never pegged you for a romantic, Cardale."

Panic rose up in his chest at the thought of Victor touching him - that _thing_ there. "Not yours," he growled. He felt like a feral animal flashing its teeth to prevent prey from taking its cub. "Never yours."

"Really?" Victor opened the lid of the bottle to take it out. It was... small in his palms. Frail. Fragile. Victor‘s one finger began stroking the veins on the upper side like he would a baby bird with its wings broken.

Eli could swear he _felt _it, felt that touch, right down to his new heart. It felt bad, but also a hell of a lot better than the _doctor‘_s touch had felt like. It felt better than it ought to. Sinful touches. He sighed involuntarily and then cursed his treacherous body.

Victor heard it, of course he did. You couldn‘t hide anything from Victor Vale, even if you wanted to. "You sure about that?"

_No. _"Yes."

Victor just smiled as if he‘d heard that too, and kept lovingly stroking his heart. The song kept blaring.

_There's something in the shadows_

_ in the corner of your room_

_ A dark heart is beating_

_ and waiting for you_

_ There is no open window, but the floors still creep_

_ In the room where you sleep._

\--

It felt like it was growing. He could _feel _it growing. All the way from inside that jar.

Funny thing about regeneration.

\--

When the heart started growing limbs, started forming a head, Eli truly began screaming then. Screaming for anyone or anything to hear his cries. The radio was still on, but he was louder.

"You have to kill it! Oh god, you have to- have to, you gotta. Kill it, _please_! Kill me."

\--

The next time the Doctor came back (he could already see eyelids on that head, oh god, he could _feel it_), it took all the strength he had for him to rub his wrists raw enough to have enough movement to grab the man‘s wrists mid walk. The man‘s skin felt warm and wrinkly. His was smooth and cold. Both of them were shaking, but at different speed.

"Please," he begged, dignity thrown out the window. "Please, you have to destroy it, before it- it"

_Before it comes over here and eats me. Before I‘m the one being replaced for a newer model._

_Can't replace me. I'm Eli fucking Ever._

_(Anything can be replaced - regrown.)_

Haverty for his part just looked confused, though the slight tremor Eli could feel indicated that he wasn‘t the only one being frightened right now.

"Destroy what?" He asked, with all the innocence of the world. As if he wasn‘t the one being responsible.

Eli just nodded unsteadily towards the direction of the jar. Doctor Haverty looked at it, then looked at him.

"What‘s wrong with it?" Eli cursed. He couldn‘t see it, couldn‘t see the danger. Eli would have to open his eyes for him. "There‘s nothing there."

"What‘s wr_ong?!_ It‘s- It-" He couldn‘t speak the words. He never did find the right words for the true horrors of this world. Him being now one of them.

"It‘s growing, it‘s remaking- remaking me. It‘s _me._" _Not me. Someone else‘s. God‘s? No._

Victor was there again, blowing rasperry kisses in the air, clearly bored. "You sure you didn‘t just lose your shit completely? I mean..." He gestured at himself, his body, in explanation.

But Eli wasn‘t crazy. At least - not that crazy. Not yet.

"_Please_, get it out," he pleaded, but from the change in Haverty‘s eyes he could tell that had been the wrong words to say. Because something worse than the growth, or him seeing his nemesis former best friend happened: The doctor was intrigued. And that never ended well.

He left it there. Of course.

\--

The funny thing-

"Huh." Eli opened his eyes to look up, sideways, towards his eternal partner. The only person who so far hadn‘t left him, even now, even when he wanted him to.

Victor was looking at the jar, transfixed. "Fascinating," he said, and licked his lips as if he wanted to eat it. The Thing wasn‘t a heart any more, but it wasn‘t a body yet, either. He still had time.

"Do you think it‘ll have your eyes?" He turned, looking him square in the face and winking. "Or mine?"

\--

The doctor had made a mistake. Or rather, one of the guards bringing him his daily meal did.

As soon as the guy stepped into his cell he could smell it. The stench. Tobacco. Cigarette smoke. Fire.

Eli smiled.

It took almost no broken bones at all for him to loosen up his wrist cuffs enough to chance a look inside the man‘s jacket. No keys, of course. They weren‘t _that _stupid. But obviously dumb enough to leave his lighter in there, as well as a pack of smokes.

Eli didn‘t smoke. But he wasn‘t opposed to fire.

\--

He waited, and waited, and waited. For the right moment. When the doc wasn‘t there. When he was alone - or well, almost.

The popping sound his hands made as he dislocated, tore and broke bones barely registered. The pain didn‘t either. He didn‘t have time to dwell, he was on the clock here.

"You know," Victor said, when Eli had already wretched free one of his hands, gingerly flexing the broken and distorted digits as they healed back together. "We could run."

_And go where?_

"They‘d find us." Of that he was sure.

Victor didn‘t even disagree with him, just watched him work on his other hand. Leg. Other leg. "I know," he replied, after a beat of silence with nothing but the sound of Eli‘s bones being broken. Victor put his hand on top of Eli‘s shoulder. It almost felt real. "But we‘d make it difficult as hell for them. And at least we‘d have some fun. It‘s so boring around here."

Eli shrugged him off, went to stand up and miscalculated his feet being healed yet. He stumbled and his leg made a _knack _sound as he fell to the floor, his ankle twisted to an unnatural degree. "No," he panted. The pain was there now, but it still wasn‘t bad enough to warrant any sort of response. Victor wasn‘t the only one who could deal in pain.

"No. I have something else to do." He looked up, up at the table, the radio, and right next to it: Him. The other him. The other him had started opening its eyes a few days ago. Heterochromatic. One of it Eli‘s and one Victor‘s. He hated that mix. It felt like a grotesque evolutionary joke.

Walking took strength, and time, time he didn‘t have. He knew about the cameras in the room. So he crawled. Victor crouched down next to him, observing.

"You can‘t kill it," Victor said, as if reading his thoughts. "You gave it to me. As a gift." Pouting, he looked like a teenager being told he had to return his favorite console.

"I‘ll give you something else." Eli took a hold of the legs of the table, and began rattling at it. Louder and louder. The radio fell on the floor first, finally silent. But he wasn‘t here for that.

"Like what? What else could you possibly give me, Eli Cardale?" Victor scoffed, but he made to move up. Looked at his friend on the floor, desperately reaching for something, and then looked at the glass jar. With a smile in Eli‘s direction, he put a finger on the glass edge and began to push in time to Eli's rattling. The glass started wobbling, and Eli was so relieved he almost had the audacity to _thank _him.

Victor kept smiling, even as the jar hit the floor and glass shards were flying everywhere. "Who knows," he said, warmly. "Maybe one of these days you‘ll give me your actual heart."

_In your dreams._

Getting to his other self was easy, after that. For a second he just sat there, sat looking at it. Looking at himself. The eyes growing out of it were staring back. _When you stare into the void but the void stares back._ Eli chuckled. This void almost looked frightened, like it knew what he wanted to do. The movement the muscle made almost made it look like it was trembling.

For a second Eli closed his eyes, then looked at it again. There was nothing there. No eyes, no movement. No second self. Just a ruined and wet muscle, good for nothing any more. Eli faltered.

He blinked again, and then the eyes were back. He was back. So he got to work.

With bloody and aching fingers he took out the lighter. His thumbs were ruined, still healing, so it took an embarrassing amount of time to ignite a flame.

"Abortion‘s a sin, you know," Victor said, but he still crouched down to truly look at the show. He didn‘t leave, never left. "You‘ll surely go to hell for this."

A flame, warm and small in his hand. Eli started laughing wetly, the laughter catching in his throat along with his tears. "I know," he said, even as he softly laid the fire to the muscle, made it catch fire on multiple points, before it truly and fully ignited. The heat was washing into his face, it started to become uncomfortable.

But he still stared at that blackening flesh, even as the guards came in and beat him. Even as he was dragged back to the operating table, this time with cuffs that cut deep into his skin.

He still stared.

Thankfully, mercifully, nothing stared back.

\--

The doctor was angry, accusing him of ruining government property. What the hell he was thinking. That there had been _nothing _there, no eyes, no nothing. That he could‘ve torched the whole facility.

Eli didn‘t care. He felt whole again, finally in one piece instead of one. His mind was clear.

\--

The funny thing about regeneration: Whatever happened, it still came from him. Came from his body. He was the master of It, if It wanted to or not.

This had been a battle of wills, this. And he‘d won. Head over Heart.

The experiments were a walk in the park after that.

\--

The next week, Stell stomped into his cell mid operation and furiously declared the experimentation for over. Fired the doctor.

He couldn‘t tell him at the point, due to the growing quantity of blood flowing into his lungs and filling up his mouth. But if he could talk, he would‘ve told him not to bother. The worst had already been over at this point.

He was finally freed. Hooray.

\--

At least the torture had been something to do, something to occupy his mind with. Now, in his new cell, he had nothing. Was nothing.

The boredom set him on edge.

"There‘s always me," Victor, who‘d apparently been transferred with him to the new holding cell, assured him. Some things never change. Like a wolf in his enclosure, he started grinning. "We could always make another of It, you and me. Together. How romantic that would be, poetic. Like a group project." He contemplated for a second. "Or a child."

Eli snarled, baring his sharp, sharp teeth. He growled.

\--

The funny thing about regeneration is this: No matter how hard you try, there‘s one thing you can‘t regrow after it snaps, like a rubber in half. A permanent road block.

It couldn‘t regrow his mind, his former sense of self, even if It wanted to. Even if It tried till the end of their days, and then some. That was dead and gone.

Oh, well.


End file.
